Blood stained the pavement and pieces of skin lay strewn on the ground after a deadly car bomb tore through the luxury JW Marriott Hotel in Jakarta’s main business district on Tuesday.
The badly charred bodies of two people lay on the driveway in front of the American-run five-star hotel where a hole almost as deep as a man had been blown out of the asphalt beside a ground-floor bistro.
At least 13 people were killed and 149 others injured, according to the Indonesian Red Cross.
As ambulances carried away the wounded and dead, tattered blinds rattled eerily behind the shattered windows of more than 60 rooms damaged by the force of the explosion. Some rooms had visible holes in their ceilings.
One wounded hotel worker described how he struggled to find his way to safety through the darkened, dusty lobby after the blast.
”There was so much dust,” said the unidentified worker, interviewed on local television as he lay in hospital. ”I wanted to get out of there but couldn’t… I wanted to get to the lobby but it was dark. There was a lot of smoke.”
The worker, speaking with an oxygen tube in his nose, said he eventually escaped by turning back toward a rear entrance.
A resident who lives in an apartment on top of the hotel also recalled the chaos.
”One of my windows was shattered by the force [of the blast] and I live on the 30th floor. We took the staircase to descend,” said Madina Sar-Diarra.
”It was a panic and once downstairs, I saw several injured people, especially cooks of the restaurant, covered in blood.”
Workers at a ground-floor deli knocked over furniture in their rush to escape the blast. Next door, diners who fled the Chianti Bistro on the ground floor of the hotel left behind partially eaten plates of food and glasses of wine.
”I heard a loud bang, then I saw people coming out… some of them were bleeding and I saw several security guards at the Marriott Hotel were also badly injured. It was very chaotic,” Jimmi, a waiter at the bistro said. Jimmi said he understood the blast happened just outside the entrance to the hotel.
Taufiq Jaber, the Lebanese ambassador to Indonesia, was due to meet an Indonesian diplomat for lunch but the blast occurred as he entered the restaurant.
”We could feel the heat of the explosion which shattered the glass all around us,” Jaber told local television. The Danish, Norwegian, Peruvian, Finnish and Swedish embassies are located in a building that adjoins the hotel.
Another witness, Andri Irwanto, was dining on the seventh floor of the neighbouring Plaza Mutiara when the blast shook the building.
Irwanto said his car and others had undergone security inspections on entering the plaza. The practice has become common in Jakarta after a series of bombings in recent years, five of them in 2003.
The US embassy has often used the Marriott hotel for its functions and press conferences, which have taken place under tight security that included sniffer dogs.
But the feeling on Tuesday was of anger at the massive security lapse.
”This is an embarrassment to the national police. It is like being slapped in the face because they have been saying that Jakarta is safe from bomb threats,” a hotel kitchen worker said.
Martoyo, another kitchen worker, said he never imagined the Marriott would be bombed and now he is worried about joining Indonesia’s large number of unemployed.
”I will not be doing any work for some time,” he said, although he at least escaped with his life, unlike some of his colleagues. A hotel security guard, Slamet Heryanto (37), died in the bombing and his younger brother, Taufan Heryanto, said at a hospital morgue that all he hoped for was that ”the government quickly arrests the perpetrators”.
Zarkasih, the uncle of another victim, condemned as an evil act the blast which left his nephew, Harna, badly charred and without his legs.
”This is not an act of human beings. This is an act of devils. They killed innocent people,” a distraught Zarkasih said. – Sapa-AFP